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The performance of financial markets is significantly influenced by the political environment during general elections. This study investigates the effect of general elections on stock market performance in selected African markets.

Prior studies have been inconsistent in determining whether electioneering events negatively or positively influence stock market performance. The study utilized panel data set with annual observations from 1990 to 2020. The generalized method of moments (GMM) is employed to investigate the effect of electioneering and change in government on key stock market performance indicators, including stock market capitalization, stock market turnover ratio and the value of stock traded.

The study finds that electioneering activities generally have a positive impact on the performance of the stock market, whereas a change in government has a negative impact. As a result, the study recommends that stakeholders of the stock market remain vigilant and actively monitor electioneering events to devise and implement effective policies aimed at mitigating political risks during general elections. By adopting these measures, investor confidence can be significantly enhanced, fostering a more robust and secure investment environment.

The study investigates a neglected section of the literature by highlighting not only the effect of elections on stock market indicators but also possible change in government during elections.

The authors examine the role of CEO political ideology in the credit rating process.

This study adopts a quantitative method with panel data regressions using a sample of 5,211 observations from S&P 500 firms from 2001 to 2012.

The authors find that firms run by Republican-leaning CEOs, who tend to have conservative political ideologies, enjoy more favorable credit ratings than firms run by Democratic-leaning CEOs. In addition, the association between CEO political ideology and credit ratings is more pronounced for firms with high operating uncertainty, low capital intensity, high growth potential, weak corporate governance and low financial reporting quality. Finally, the authors find that CEO political ideology affects a firm's cost of debt incremental to credit ratings, consistent with debt investors incorporating CEO political ideology in their pricing decisions.

Leveraging CEO political ideology, the authors document that credit rating agencies incorporate managerial conservatism in their credit rating decisions. This finding suggests that CEO political ideology serves as a meaningful signal for managerial conservatism.

The study suggests that credit rating agencies incorporate CEO political ideology in their credit rating process. Other capital market participants such as auditors and retail investors can also use CEO political ideology as a proxy for managerial conservatism when evaluating firms.

The paper carries practical implications for practitioners, firm executives and regulators. The results on the association between CEO political ideology and credit ratings suggest that other financial institutions could also incorporate CEO political ideology in their evaluation in their evaluation of firms. For example, when evaluating audit risk and determining audit pricing, auditors may add CEO political ideology as a risk factor. For firms, especially those that have Democratic-leaning CEOs, the authors suggest that they could reduce the unfavorable effect of CEO political ideology on credit ratings by improving their corporate governance and financial reporting quality, as demonstrated in the cross-sectional analyses. Finally, this study shows that CEO political ideology, as measured by CEOs' political contributions, is closely related to a firm's credit ratings. This finding may inform regulators that greater transparency for CEOs' political contributions is needed as information on contributions could help capital market participants perform risk analyses for firms.

Credit rating agencies release their research methodologies for determining corporate credit ratings and identify managerial conservatism as an important factor that affects their risk assessments. The extant literature, however, has not empirically investigated the relation between credit ratings and managerial conservatism, which, according to behavioral consistency theory, can be proxied by CEO political ideology. This study provides novel empirical evidence that identifies CEO political ideology as an important input factor in the credit rating process.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the life history of the Spanish Generation X over the last five decades.

Considering that the generational cohort concept can be identified from the marketing side as a market segment, this paper proposes to analyze the socio-economic and cultural context that has marked the different life stages of Generation X, and how they have related to brands according to their needs, desires and aspirations.

The results show that the customer journey can be considered a circular concept. The customer’s relationship with the brand can begin in childhood and continue into adulthood, such that the emotional relationship established with the brand as a child influences purchase decisions in adulthood.

Although limited to the analysis of Generation X and its relationship with brands, this paper shows the importance of knowing the socio-economic, legal and cultural context of a generation.

As a business implication, the importance of remarketing is evident as a business strategy that reinforces the emotional connection between the brand and the different generations.

From a social point of view, this paper shows the power of brands as an element of self-expression of the needs, tastes or preferences of individuals is evident.

This paper offers a different and innovative vision of the customer journey, taking into account the individual’s life cycle, and the way in which at each stage of life, he/she relates to brands in a different way.

For close to two decades, the West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ) has been preparing to launch a second monetary union within the ECOWAS region. This study aims to determine the impact such a unionised monetary regime will have on financial stability as represented by the nonperforming loan ratios of Ghana in a counterfactual framework.

This study models nonperforming loan ratios as dependent on the monetary policy rate and the business cycle. The study then used historical data to estimate the parameters of the nonperforming loan ratio response function using an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach. The estimated parameters are further used to estimate the impact of several counterfactual unionised monetary policy rates on the nonperforming loan ratios and its volatility of Ghana. As robustness check, the Least Absolute Shrinkage Selection Operator (LASSO) regression is also used to estimate the nonperforming loan ratios response function and to predict nonperforming loans under the counterfactual unionised monetary policy rates.

The results of the counterfactual study reveals that the apparent cost of monetary unification is much less than supposed with a monetary union likely to dampen volatility in non-performing loans in Ghana. As such, the WAMZ members should increase the pace towards monetary unification.

The paper contributes to the existing literature by explicitly modelling nonperforming loan ratios as dependent on monetary policy and the business cycle. The study also settles the debate on the financial stability cost of a monetary union due to the nonalignment of business cycles and economic structures.

The purpose of this study is to examine the transmission of volatility between business confidence index and stock market indices in Greece. The country remains the riskiest project in European Union (EU) and previous studies fail to reach an accurate conclusion regarding the direction of this transmission.

The study covers the period from January 2013 to August 2022 in monthly basis where important economic events occur. Considering that these economic events derive strong volatility moments, the authors adopt a new methodology that measures the transmission of volatility with higher precision. This is the generalized spillover analysis by Diebold and Yilmaz (2009, 2012).

The results indicate that Business Confidence Index (BCI) is the main receiver of volatility spillovers in Greece under all aspects of the used methodology. The specificity of the results shows that business activity through a green growth model is what drives investor confidence and then their activities.

Although a handful of studies have considered the transmission of volatility between BCI and stock market indices, this study contributes in several ways. This study focuses on one country (Greece), avoiding the dispersion of the results from the examination of the relationship in several countries. The used country remains the riskiest project in EU even nowadays, while other studies fail to confirm the main direction of volatility spillovers from business confidence to stock returns. This study covers a period that is ignored by previous studies and includes important economic events. In addition, considering that these economic events derive strong volatility moments, a new methodology is adopted in this field of research that measures the transmission of volatility with higher accuracy.

This study aims to examine how business executives' political connections are associated with government subsidies and strategic change, and how they, in turn, influence firm performance, measured by return on assets (ROA) and market share.

Hypotheses were tested using the large firm-level dataset provided by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) of China for the period 2003–2013. This is one of the most comprehensive datasets of Chinese manufacturing companies and includes 321,722 firms on average per year, which spans over 37 industries.

The authors found that political connections, measured by senior executives' membership in the National People's Congress of China (NPC), were positively associated with government subsidies but were not associated with strategic change. Also, government subsidies, as the underlying mechanism, mediated the relationships between NPC membership and firm performance but strategic change did not.

By examining the possible mediators between corporate political strategies and firm performance, the authors confirmed the thought that the impact of political connections on firm performance is a complex phenomenon and goes beyond a simple direct effect. However, future research could explore other mediators in this relationship.

While the direct relationship between political connections and firm performance has been examined in management literature, the results are mixed. For the first time, the authors addressed the gap and opened the “black box” – the underlying mechanisms of this relationship. This study's findings contribute to the literature on corporate political activity, strategic change, and their influences on firm performance.

Within the current institutional landscape, characterized by increased societal and governmental emphasis on environmental preservation, there is growing interest in the potential of digital transformation (DT) to advance the circular economy (CE). Nonetheless, the empirical substantiation of the connection between DT and CE remains limited. This study seeks to investigate the impact of DT on CE at the organizational level and examine how various institutional factors may shape this relationship within the Chinese context.

To scrutinize this association, we construct a research framework and formulate hypotheses drawing on institutional theory, obtaining panel data from 238 Chinese-listed high-tech manufacturing firms from 2006 to 2019. A regression analysis approach is adopted for the sample data.

Our regression analysis reveals a positive influence of DT on CE performance at the organizational level. Furthermore, our findings suggest that the strength of this relationship is bolstered in the presence of heightened regional institutional development and industry competition. Notably, we find no discernible effect of a firm’s political connections on the DT–CE performance nexus.

This study furnishes empirical evidence on the relationship between DT and CE performance. By elucidating the determinants of this relationship within the distinct context of Chinese institutions, our research offers theoretical and practical insights, thus laying the groundwork for subsequent investigations into this burgeoning area of inquiry.

This paper aims to explore the effects of two drivers, namely, the received fundings and its interaction with the specialized competences owned by the managerial board, on the R&D activities performed by start-ups.

This paper tests hypotheses on a sample of 405 innovative start-ups established in Italy and registered into the Chamber of Commerce official database. This study uses the R&D expenses as a measure of the innovative performance of start-up, and the authors also collected the number and total amount of grants received by them and the presence of high qualified team in their management board.

The analysis reveals that both the number and total amount of grants received by start-ups positively impact the innovative performance. The same is for the integration of the total amount of grants with the presence of high qualified team in the management board.

This study did not distinguish between different types of grants adopted by start-ups, while it would be interesting to study whether any difference does exist among them in terms of their influence on innovative performance. Also, this paper considers the total number of specialized people in the team while it would certainly be interesting to analyze people’s background and competences in relation to the innovative performances.

This paper allows us to offer some provisional conclusions such as having funds in the preliminary phase of start-up life cycle, and investments mainly for R&D expenses. The start-up must also leverage its skills and therefore it is necessary to invest in human capital.

Findings suggest that policymakers should introduce integrated measures to support start-ups throughout the entire life cycle, from the creation of the idea to incubation up to industrial consolidation.

This paper focuses on the determinants of start-up innovative performance because both external (such as political, economic, social and technological) and internal (such as organizational) influencing factors have to be considered as crucial for start-ups innovation and growth. Finally, this study is one of the few attempts exploring the phenomenon by using an empirical methodology based on real and certificated data.

The study utilises unique survey data gathered from 12,427 party members. The dependent variable measures party members’ in-party commitment and is based on willingness to donate money, to contribute effort, the feeling of belonging in the party network and social trust in the party network.

In this article, we study how different extra-parliamentary online and offline activities are associated with in-party commitment amongst political party members from the six largest Finnish parties. We especially delve into the differences between members of the Finnish parties.

We found that extra-parliamentary political activity, including connective action through social media networks and collective action through civic organisations, is highly associated with members’ in-party commitment. Additionally, members of the newer identity parties more effectively utilised social media networks, whilst the traditional interest parties were still more linked to traditional forms of extra-parliamentary political action.

By employing the sociological network theory perspective, the study contributes to ongoing discussions surrounding the impact of social media on political participation amongst party members, both within and beyond the confines of political parties.

In developing countries, how risk management technologies influence management accounting and control (MAC) practices is under-researched. By drawing on insights from institutional studies, this study aims to examine the multiple institutional pressures surrounding an entity and influencing its risk-based management control (RBC) system – that is, how RBC appears in an emerging market attributed to institutional multiplicity.

The authors used qualitative case study research methods to collect empirical evidence from a privately owned Egyptian insurance company.

The authors observed that in the transformation to risk-based controls, especially in socio-political settings such as Egypt, changes in MAC systems were consistent with the shifts in the institutional context. Along with changes in the institutional environment, the case company sought to configure its MAC system to be more risk-based to achieve its strategic goals effectively and maintain its sustainability.

This research provides a fuller view of risk-based management controls based on the social, professional and political perspectives central to the examined institutional environment. Moreover, unlike early studies that reported resistance to RBC, this case reveals the institutional dynamics contributing to the successful implementation of RBC in an emerging market.